Praying hands.

[Image source: Microsoft Word Clipart]

Since my youth, I have long felt little connection to the many visual postures of prayer that often populate our Christian lives. The traditional image set forth of our pleas and petitions to God - two hands pressed lightly against each other, palms gently folded together in quietude and stillness of mind - was so thoroughly static, so devoid of vitality and vivacity, that it assailed even my young, malformed images of entering the Presence.

So it was that, even in my old listless dearth of faith, showing up to church with no pleas, no longings, and no desire for renewal, I began praying with fingers interwoven, hands clenched together, grasping at one another for support and mutual affirmation. Even as my heart and soul shrugged their way methodically, mechanically, through a yet-another (as in, "yet another Sunday service, prayer meeting, family prayer, etc."), at least my body found tension, dynamism, movement. But not growth.

Still, this manual configuration, of digits weaving and palms pressing, was the natural mold into which my hands fell even as I found - again, or for the first time, depending upon whose soteriology and ontology you lean - the brilliance and joy of a life lived in concert with that Holy Love (ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ), the Divine Father, the Great Friend. As my soul began wrestling with Truth - with conflict, with the ideal-real disparity, with the weight and depth of my own sin (and the corresponding value and immensity of Grace) - the twists and turns of my hands were filled with new spiritual life, a physical metaphor of the incredibly more real spiritual struggle and discovery.

Recently, however, I've been rediscovering the classic posture of prayer. It's not that I've altogether abandoned my childhood or the ways of my younger Christian faith in favor of a mature devotion: that would be giving my contemporary practices far too much credit.

Rather, I've unearthed the traditional configuration of praying hands for what it ought to be: these hands are not destined to merely be soft planes joined palm-to-palm in silent, motionless repose. No, they push together, inwards. They splay together, forearms pressing, fingertips tensed against one another; they stand at rest, but not for lack of intensity. No, tension is in them; it may be inherent, or potential. There is potency in each half of a pair of praying hands; they are joined together not of convenience or aesthetic ease, but because the forcefulness of each plane, on its own, needs its twin. And yes, sometimes my joints slide past one another, and the digits interface; but when my hands interlock in this manner, it can often feel as though I have simply come to a conflicted standstill.

When my hands press and push against one another, though - as my thoughts do, as this world and God's Word do - then sometimes I feel my spirit rising up.
Knowing that conflict, even unresolved, does often stand as the breath of wind's currents, pushing up against me, prompting, provoking, pressuring me to less of me, more of You, God.

Fundamentally speaking

The questions seem to proceed, in rational order:
Am I alone?
Where is the Other, the self, and the other self?
Are they sustainable?

If we cannot - do not - share in suffering, then do we share? (Is it categorically selfishness to share joy and not pain?)

From where does a conception of duty arise, and to what extent are its boundaries self-determined?


Grace must cover it all over.

Weakness

O God, you chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise;
O God, you chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong!

Authority

"They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law."

(Mark 1:21-22)

Authority: "The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge", from French, autorite, "book or quotation that settles an argument," (c. 1230), from
Author: "One who sets forth written statements," from Latin, autor, "father", "one who causes to grow," from Latin, augere, "to increase".

So, authority, at least in some vague etymological degree, means the power or quality of the father. ehhhhh

UCW in the News

"There’s a Korean church on Harrison Street, and it rents space to a nursery school and to the New Haven branch of the Metropolitan Community Church, a gay and lesbian denomination."

Yep... that be us.

-It's a Wonderful Block, New York Times 10/05/2008. Online archive.

you heard it here

I was doing some reading in the Bible this morning and came across this passage in Scripture... then looked at my calendar... then back at this verse.

"From this day on, from this twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, give careful thought to the day when the foundation of the LORD's temple was laid." (Haggai 2:18)

Real Talk. 9/24.

Prostitutes and tax collectors.

[Adapted from correspondence]

At my church this morning, our associate pastor gave a really moving (well, it moved me) sermon about...

OK. To be honest, I was not paying attention during a massive portion of the sermon, because I got like 4 hours of sleep last night during a sleepover at Adam Y-V's house (4 Christian brothers = hallelujah, a Godly confraternity!). I did gather, in between desperate attempts to at least appear attentive, that, in general, the pastor was talking about the salvific power of Christ: how He can reach anybody, regardless of where they are coming from or located at in their lives. A good topic, one with which I'm sure we are all more or less generally familiar. Good stuff, good stuff... but not really one (at least when broadly approached) likely to be provoking a lot of introspection for me (this is a sad truth, and more likely just about my own foolishness than the weightiness of the topic).

But, towards the end of the sermon, the preacher started talking about how the depths of sin from which God had saved him. He is an ex-gangster/drug dealer/adulterer/etc. He's been jailed multiple times. But the point that he kept hammering home was that God had always walked there beside him and before him (that is why we call Him a God that is previous). When he was dealing drugs, God was there with him. When he was sleeping with whoever, God was with him. When he was putting a needle in his arm for drugs, God was there with him. Kanye West might say that Jesus walks... but the truth is, He does so in such thorough ways that we got no clue.

And then the pastor drew a parallel between Jesus' always being with us (even to the end of the age) and Jesus going to be in tax collectors' houses, down to be with them after - and while - they partied. Tax collectors, prostitutes, these were basically the two sides of the "immoral" coin: few men could be more despised than a tax collector, and few women regarded as more shameful or less worthy of respect in that culture. (And of course, we could talk on and on about gender roles in 1st-century Israel/Judea and what it means and signifies that a man would become a tax collector or a woman a prostitute.)

Now, as he started talking about these people with whom Jesus associated himself, my mind started wandering again... but, this time, I think it was a Godly wandering; less a loss of focus than a purposeful redirection of it.

I began recollecting how, so often, I have held a sanitized view of Jesus. About how I intellectually assent to the fact that Jesus hung out with "bad people", but I somehow disengage those "bad people" from their "bad acts" while Jesus was with them. As though He existed in a little bubble of goodness and moral rectitude that somehow charmed the corrupt moral fibre of those around Himself into marginal and temporary sanitation.

But the thing that I realized today was... nope. Basically: the parties to which Jesus went to were not saintly affairs. Jesus hung out with tax collectors. And prostitutes. Let's run over that again:
-Tax collectors (i.e. men who, by virtue of their corruption or/and low moral standards, had a lot of money).
-And prostitutes (i.e. women who, for whatever reason, did... things... in exchange for money).

And ummm... I'm sure that those tax collectors and prostitutes were not just getting together to chill and read the news. While I'm sure that they might have felt ashamed by His presence there - or, more likely, odd and a little weirded out (all ay yo who is that dude hanging out outside talking to everybody but not coming into the party? why isnt he gettin down with the ladies; he shy or gay or somethin?) - but I'm also fairly sure that His presence didn't change all that much of their behavior, and certainly all their behaviors (Isaiah 53:3 - "He was despised, and we esteemed him not").

So this is our God. Going back to a devotional I wrote a little while back, this is our real Hosea: our Christ. He loved each and every one of those people in those parties more than anyone we have ever loved, and he was there to watch them forsake Him for cheap, quick, objectifying lustiness. And He was, so much, Loving Grace, that, instead of fleeing from the scene, unable to handle it, He remained with those people, utterly in love with them.

Can we do this?? I can still remember the dread heartache I felt this one time in high school, when I was dating some girl and she basically started falling for this other guy. I could see it coming, I could hear it on the phone; and she probably could, too. I can still recall so vividly well the sinking emptiness of love taken and rejected; or worse, a love accepted but left without reciprocation.

To use a gross term: love abused.

It's the same feeling you get (well, I do anyhow) when you see that girl (or guy, though I wouldn't know about that.... im guessing it's the same) you have a crush on, or even just sort of fancy, talking a little too closely with some other person, or coming to the party with them, or (ha ha here do I give too much away?) going back and forth avidly from facebook wall to wall with a few too many ;)'s and =)'s for comfort (yeah that was a little of a stalker-ish example. I don't actually do that, promise).

You know that feeling? That hollowness which shakes you in your very heart and to the pit of your stomach? Your very essence of being?

Now imagine Christ - Lover and Husband and Knower of every individual person - not only not avoiding that feeling (magnified by an infinity of comprehension, I'm sure), but seeking it out.

Desiring to give us grace so much that, instead of fleeing when we adulterers approach Him, instead of simply standing still and waiting for us to come to Him, loving these sinners - we prostitutes and we tax collectors - so much that He actually sought them (us!) out, even in the midst of their (our!!) very moment of consummated adultery?

That's a God I can cry out to. That the God whose grace can (and did) bring me to my knees during worship after the sermon, literally crying out for His Cross to be mine. And I hope - I think - that my tears might be the same as those of Mary Magdalene (also a woman with a sordid past... as are we all [not women. Having sordid pasts.]), which watered His sore feet.

This is the God who is seeking me out, to embrace me, as I go to Internet sites that I shouldn't go to, or talk to girls that I don't really need to be talking to, in ways that I don't really need to be talking, about things that don't really deserve discussion.
This is the God who is desiring me, when I'm obsessing over clothes, or money, or sneakers, or any of a thousand other things which could be good but are too-often idols.
This is the God who loves me when I commit adultery with the manifold succubi of my own creation;
and one day, one day soon, one day already, this is the God whose love will be so greatly and obviously revealed to me that I will finally turn back and fall in love with that God once and for all.